As Trumpists attempt to undermine the investigation by Robert Mueller into Putin loyalist and justice obstructor Donald "Rump" Trump with the Nunes memo, our major ally, the UK, is warning that the misleading and cherry-picked statements in the memo could compromise its intelligence gathering. The memo falsely alleges that raw intelligence gathered by former British intelligence official Christopher Steele formed the entire basis for a FISA warrant to wiretap Rump Russian advisor Carter "The Idiot" Page. The intelligence officials indicated that in the future, they would be less likely to share intelligence with the U.S. as a result.
Flash back to last year. The day after Rump fired former FBI Director James Comey, he bragged to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office not only about taking pressure off the Russian election meddling investigation, but about some top secret intelligence involving Israeli operations to undermine ISIS. The Israeli intelligence community was understandably outraged by the breach of trust with an ally of its enemy Iran. New reporting by Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman indicates that intelligence breach was even worse than originally reported.
As our allies see that an ignorant and reckless man-baby has no hesitation to use classified information they've shared with us to puff up his ego or to create confusion over his potentially treasonous relationship with Moscow, they will pull away from us, and make us far less safe.
BONUS: Andrew Cohen has one of the many good reads about this. A snippet:
...[T]here is nothing frivolous politically or morally about the publication of the Nunes memo, which I believe is the manifestation of a chilling conspiracy between the White House and its most supine supporters on Capitol Hill to aid the Russians and undermine the nation’s law enforcement and intelligence apparatus. We already knew before it was released that the memo is not the whole truth. It can’t be. We already knew that it isn’t a version of any truth worth relying on since we don’t know what we don’t know about the intelligence behind it. One could summarize the Bible and turn it into an ode to the Devil himself, right? [snip]
The big winner in all of this, of course, is Vladimir Putin. What a week for him! On Monday, his man in Washington, Donald Trump, refused to impose those sanctions Congress voted overwhelmingly to impose on the Russians as punishment for their interference in our elections. And today the White House and Congressional Republicans made this reckless move to undermine the credibility of America’s intelligence and law enforcement communities. As Sen. John McCain, the ailing Republican from Arizona just put it, “if we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s work for him.” Indeed, Donald Trump and Devin Nunes are doing just that. (our emphasis)
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